Genome-wide Association Analysis of Maize Flowering Traits

ZHANG Haiying; GAO Shu; LI Binyang; ZHONG Haixu; ZHANG Zhicheng; LUO Bowen

Genome-wide Association Analysis of Maize Flowering Traits

2021

Flowering regulation is important for maize to adapt to a variety of environments as well as associated with high yield. In this study, the genetic mechanism of three flowering traits of 310 maize inbred lines with rich genetic background was investigated in three years at three different environments such as days to tasseling (DTT), days to silking (DTS) and days to pollen shedding (DTP). Based on mean performance, the longest flowering time was observed in Zhanyi (2018), whereas the shortest in Shizong (2019). The coefficient of variance depicted the range from 3.62% to 9.06% for three flowering traits under all environments. Therefore, we have integrated these flowering traits corresponding to SNP molecular markers for genome-wide association study (GWAS). Results showed that 22 SNPs markers were significantly associated with DTT according to physical position and average linkage disequilibrium (LD) decay distance, and a total of 234 candidate genes were identified near these significantly associated SNP markers. Moreover, KEGG and GO analysis showed that these genes were enriched in the regulation of the physiological pathways for flowering. In more details, 16 genes involved in development of floral organs are more worthy of our attention in future studies.

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